Ape Rifle

With springtime this year returns a particular type of seasonal frenzy: the Montreal Canadiens, darlings of the city and local media obsession, are in the NHL playoffs. In a place where the terms ‘hockey’ and ‘civic pride’ are often interchangeable, Montrealers have responded in a flurry of excitement and anticipation. Even the police, traditionally wary of such times thanks to infamous hockey-fueled riots (see 1955, 1986 and 1993), have made their peace with the fans by sporting Canadiens flags on their cruisers. Just like many taxis, and a decent percentage of vehicles in the city.

The Canadiens in the playoffs aren’t just the talk of the town: they are the town. Social calendars revolve around game nights, and the landscape is noticeably more bleu, blanc et rouge. The acoustics inside the Bell Centre, the team’s arena, are rarely below a deafening roar. Beer is still unbelievably overpriced, the in-game light-and-sound show designed for suffers of attention deficit disorder is as ingratiating as ever- but no one cares. Attention is focused on the drama playing out on the ice. The goalie of the Boston Bruins, who have the current misfortune of being on the wrong end of Montreal fans’ energy, equated his appearance at Montreal’s temple of hockey with being like a gladiator. Thankfully, these days you only get killed by the media and jeers as opposed to your opponent’s blade.

Worship of the Canadiens is perhaps so strong because of hockey’s power of unification. In a city so traditionally divided by linguistics and political allegiances, here is something that everyone can get behind with no questions asked. The storied history of the team has provided common legends for all Montrealers to consider their own- English, French or otherwise. This year’s crop of players have a particularly Russian flavour. Much more so than the vapid corporate nonsense of the Olympics, here’s an example of the power of sport and spectacle to transcend societal divisions. Rich? Poor? Federalist? Separatist? Doctor? Truck Driver? All are glued to a screen or their seats, ready to burst forth in celebration or, alternatively, in brutal cursing of the referee. It takes quite the stodgy curmudgeon not to get caught up in this hockey fever.

It has been oft argued that nationalism has replaced Catholicism as Quebec’s dominant religion, but to this I would add that hockey is equally carrying the weight of spirituality in this post-Christian society. And if the Canadiens are the deity of choice in these parts, then this is the holy season. And what is fueling this faith? The belief that, in a league hijacked by marketing and American sunbelt cities with indifferent fans, hockey’s ultimate prize might just return to its true home.

There is no getting around it: Montreal in early spring is a messy place. The thick blanket of white that smothers the city during the dark winter months pulls back to reveal a wide variety of discarded trash, soaking on wet sidewalks and covered in the residual rock salt of de-icing efforts. The roadways are battered and cracked, the mud of construction sites and vacant lots leaking out onto them and into cavernous potholes. Many street corners remain lakes over which pedestrians must jump, and snowbanks decay into an attractive shade of brown or exhaust black. The temperature rises, to be sure, but people remain weary and slightly on edge, not yet convinced that blinding snowfalls are a things of the past. In this part of the world, winter often says goodbye with a massive spring blizzard. How considerate.

Needless to say, at this time of year the city does not look its best. A massive proportion of Montreal’s built environment now dates from the mid-20th century, when concrete was king and grey and brown were de rigueur. Soggy weather brings out the worst aspects of this discarded architectural style, sucking the colour out of the landscape and leaving a residue of marred roads and brutal buildings. Thankfully, the passage of time brings forth a blast of sunlight and a return to the world of colour.

Passing by the street corner pictured above, I couldn’t help but read a scene full of meaning. On a superficial level, the billboard is typical in that it reflects the impossible fantasies of salvation through real estate, in which gorgeous conceptual renditions never quite match the resulting physical structure. Reality has that annoying habit of being slightly messier.

On a more symbolic level, this image spoke to me as a declaration of springtime and renewal, not only in terms of weather but for this particular corner of the city. It has long been populated by concrete, decay and idles spaces devoid of activity outside of the summer Jazz Festival onslaught. As neighbourhoods go, this one around Place-des-Arts (a major performing arts complex) has excelled as a void, a complete hole between busier and more lively parts of the city’s core. Urban change at its scarring worst, one could say.

Montreal is trying to change all this. Having re-baptized the area as the Quartier des Spectacles, the city has revved up some ambitious renewal plans of the usual kind, in which North American cities have nowhere else to turn but permanent spectacle, tourism and nebulous ‘cultural’ industries. A long neglected urban splace has thus sprouted colourful fencing and construction sites, including the condominium tower above. With a minimal amount of fanfare, chunks of the city are changing drastically. Like winter begrudgingly giving way to spring, this bleak landscape of empty lots and bunker bank towers could regain both colour and, more importantly, some vitality.

But as with spring, there is always the possibility of that massive blizzard rolling in to spoil the fun. A prolonged economic mess in North America, a political flare-up at the provincial level of the kind that ravages Montreal’s optimism, a development approach that transforms all space into playgrounds for the wealthy- the sources of weariness are many. But as it is with the arrival of every spring, hope springs forth; amidst the dirty snow and mangled infrastructure, people sense the sun is truly and finally coming. Hopefully, the same can be said for the fortunes of this fair city.

Parking on rue Roy, Plateau-Mont-Royal, Montreal

Montreal, Quebec

Mr. Spielberg’s much publicized about-face regarding his participation in Beijing’s upcoming summer spectacle is a media dream come true, a potent attention-grabbing mix of Hollywood celebrity, African misery and Chinese power. Coming soon after a similarly themed mini-scandal in Britain, this development bodes ill for the host government, so intent on keeping this sporting circus framed solely through the prism of smiling pandas and dancing ethnic minorities. As the usual activists get fired up by the renewed publicity of their cause(s), it could be a long and laborious run-up to August for internet censors in the Middle Kingdom. 

It is, perhaps, unfair that Beijing is singled out for its amoral pursuit of black gold via tainted regimes when numerous other nations undertake similarly unsavory ventures in other, less publicized locales. With so many bloody hands on the international stage, it is difficult to even fathom the number of boycotts that, in an ideal world, would grind to a halt any major transnational gathering in 2008. After all, Mr. Spielberg’s native land has in recent years invaded (and continues to occupy) another nation in an unprovoked attack. Post-Soviet Russia has spent a good amount of its time and energy reducing Chechnya to rubble. Canada, with its rapid development of the carbon-suicide oil sands in Alberta, could feasibly be accused of grave crimes, albeit of a more environmental nature.

While it is highly questionable whether international politics should entangle sporting events, Beijing has nevertheless managed to shoot itself quite squarely in the foot in this instance. Its calls for an ‘apolitical’ event fall on disbelieving ears since it has effectively made the hosting of this two-week sporting event a defining element of its own agenda. Its messages of sports unity and non-interfere translate, beyond Chinese borders, into “if anyone is going to play these games for political gain, it’s damn well going to be us”. When you play with hubris, you have to expect to get burnt. Position the Games as a flexing of your muscles, and those who disapprove of your actions (for reasons founded or unfounded) will seek to humble you. This is not rocket science.

Beyond this debate, however, lies a much deeper and more disturbing question: what was Spielberg doing as an artistic advisor to the Beijing Games in the first place?I have trouble believe the organizers of these games imagined the ideal opening or closing ceremony to resemble a Universal Studios theme park, with dinosaurs crashing about or an aging Harrison Ford being chased into the Bird’s Nest by a boulder. A segment about Munich, perhaps? Tom Hanks carrying in the torch dressed in vintage WWII GI gear or, dare I say it, Zhang Ziyi in full geisha attire? 

A culture as rich and spectacular as the Chinese should not need recourse to the talents of an American blockbuster king to throw together a few song-and-dance routines. Evidently the whole affair smells of a publicity stunt, albeit one now gone wrong. That the Chinese organizers felt they needed a recognized celebrity from a foreign land to add some credibility to their party plans reveals a rising giant that is still insecure in its own skin, an awkward teenager on a growth spurt that craves approval. Unaware of its own attractive qualities, China seeks to imitate the popular kids in the hope of fitting in. Enter Rem Koolhaus, Sir Foster and the usual suspects to play off this for the sake of realizing their wildest architectural fantasies. 

And I, for one, find this extremely unfortunate. The Chinese have so much to offer in their people, history and culture, but it is questionable whether any of this will truly be on display come August. The need to impress at all costs long ago gained primacy over such humble considerations. And so visitors should be forgiven for any confusion when they encounter Chinese culture  as a haphazard collection of berserk architectural monoliths designed by Europeans. At the very least, however, they can now be relieved that a mechanical Jaws will not be attacking the opening ceremony.   

In urban Canada, the pervasive use of heavy-duty vehicles stems mostly from environmentally destructive ego-tripping as opposed to any actual utility in road navigation. The proverbial marketing image of an SUV climbing steeply up the Rockies reveals itself to be utter nonsense when, in reality, said machines spend the majority of their lifetimes cruising well-paved expressways and idling in expansive parking lots. As a result, I suspect such vehicles are now designed to be little more than big and shiny- a suspicion brought about by the observation of such vehicles having just as much a propensity to get stuck in snow as their much smaller, car-like counterparts. The ‘utility’ aspect of SUV has grown largely meaningless and, judging by the girth of our waistlines, so has the ’sport’.

In the northern reaches of Mozambique around Pemba, however,  a whole other reality was to be found. To describe the road network there as rudimentary would be to erroneously imply that the rough dirt tracks which comprised the vast majority of it could be considered roads at all. Two lonely single-lane paved highways served the region’s sparse road traffic, the only chance at a journey in which one’s backside was not irreparably damaged. Unfortunately, these oases of pavement where often only the very start or end of a long journey: to get to most villages involved the lengthy navigation of cratered dirt tracks, many of which were further obliterated during the heavy summer rainfalls. The infrastructural engineering feats of industrial humanity have yet to encroach on this space, and the landscape still dictates, often limiting, the scope of human movement. There was nothing unusual about spending several hours to travel a mere 20-30km. 

Pemba, as the provincial capital of Cabo Delgado, was somewhat of a diamond in the rough in this regard. Isolated on the tip of a peninsula by an enormous bay, its old colonial core had a small network of paved streets on which travelled the town’s traffic of motorcycles, scooters, pickup trucks, battered sedans and beaten up chapas (the Mozambican version of the globally ubiquitous private minivan service, complete with East Asian characters still painted on their sides). The main road stretched from the old port through the town centre, past the airport and down the peninsula and out onto the mainland (where it became one of the two cherished paved highways). A half-hearted police checkpoint left over from more tumultuous times marked, quite literally, the boundary between this small pocket of urban bustle and the vast interior beyond. 

Under these conditions, heavy-duty 4X4 vehicles were not symbols of conspicuous consumption gone awry but rather essential tools to anyone in the business of semi-serious road travel. In and around Pemba, that consisted in no small part of NGOs, international development agencies and government ministries- in fact, most vehicles in town apart from the white sedan taxis and chapas had some manner of logo, national flag or donor agency name plastered on their doors and bumpers. One was never in doubt that ‘development’ was one of the major employers and key industries in the area, for better or worse, populating the roads with shiny Japanese pickup trucks (the Land Cruiser being a particular favourite).

The organization I worked with had its own small fleet of such vehicles, manned by a dedicated team of pothole-hardened drivers. They were responsible for the driving on all field trips, generally trying to maximize speed and distance covered while minimizing bodily injury. They were a friendly, talkative lot (as drivers always are, it would seem), laughing and chatting away while honking some poor unsuspecting cyclist into the roadside brush in a cloud of dust. My experiences of the road in Mozambique consisted largely of sitting in the passenger seat as these men worked their magic over potholes and around ditches.

Of course, the roads in this region were not all fun and games. For reasons that an economic geographer could better explain, the roads passed right through the heart of villages, or alternatively created village clusters as people erected their huts on the side to sell firewood, warm Cokes and faded David Beckham t-shirts. This caused a particular problem when it came to the two paved highways in the region, however, as they played a risky dual role as high-speed thoroughfare and residential pedestrian street. It was a semi-regular occurrence for high speed travel along the lonely highway to turn a corner into a pseudo-market taking place on and across the roadway at a crucial road junction. The preferred response? Lots of honking and a number of leaping people, goats and chickens. 

Unfortunately- but unsurprisingly -in these conditions, pedestrian road fatalities were slowly becoming part and parcel of the scene in the area. On one particular field trip, the vehicle in which I was traveling had reached a central junction (’central’ in these parts meaning a cluster of huts and shacks made from mud, wood and grass) when we were waved down by the police. I thought we were being randomly controlled as part of the profitable enterprise that is law enforcement in such places. Instead, the police chatted calming with the driver and the next thing I knew a few uniformed officers had hopped in the flatbed of the truck and we were back on our way. They weren’t pulling us over- we were giving them a lift! I felt that particular sense of bemusement possible only when one finds themselves witnessing the culturally surreal in a foreign land, the perfect fodder for laughs and nostalgia over drinks with friends at a later time and another place.

My sense of bemusement waned when I learned the purpose of these hitch-hiking cops. Not being up to scratch in high-speed Portuguese, I caught next to none of the conversation that led to our vehicle doubling as a police cruiser. A co-worker along for the ride, however, humoured me and explained what was going on. There had been an accident in one of the village down the road, and the police officers were needed at the scene- but they had no way of getting there (perhaps their vehicle and/or fuel was being used for decidedly non-official purposes at the time by someone else, which was nothing out of the ordinary). They had asked the driver if he could give them a lift to the scene of the crime, because we were heading that way anyways.

The police knew of the accident, I learned, because the driver involved had told them about it as he passed through the junction where we had picked them up. Apparently, the man had hit someone on his way through a village, but had not stopped for fear of being attacked by the angry residents. So he continued on and duly informed the officers at the next police post. What became of this driver I never found out, but my guess is he went undisturbed on his way.

A little while later, our vehicle slowed as we approached the village in question. There was a crowd gathered on the road side, comprised of everyone from the village elders to the usual mischievous toddlers with wild hair. It was not uncommon for a vehicle passing through a village to cause a certain amount of waving and shrieking on the part of the younger residents- I’m sure foreign faces passing at high speed can be exciting when you are a kid. Within this crowd, however, there was little sense of welcome. The people were not hostile, but neither were they warm. Instead a cold hush seemed to permeate the scene, with people’s eyes exhibiting tension and uncertainty. As we stopped, I saw the source of their consternation.

In the middle of the road lay the victim of the high-speed accident, deceased and peacefully draped with a blanket. The small outlined shape was that of a child. 

The police officers hoped out of the back of the pickup truck and thanked our driver for the lift. The eyes of the village were fixed on our vehicle and the white faces inside it, and a combination of unease and guilt started to wash over me. Guilt for what? I’m not really sure, to this day. But in that particular instance anything and everything that had to do with development and privilege somehow felt responsible. The sort of privilege that values those able to travel by car over those trying to scrape an existence out of selling wood on the roadside, or toiling all day in fields of maize. 

Before the situation could even begin to sink in, we were off on our way. Our pickup truck, sporting shiny agency logos and a donor country flag or two, took off back into the dirt, leaving behind the dead child to an angry village in mourning. They couldn’t leave the mortality behind with a shift of gears and a cloud of dust- my surreal memory of a transient event was their much more permanent tragedy. 

Despite my best efforts to immerse myself in my current Canadian environment, my mind often wanders back to my life on the beach in Mozambique. Ok, not literally on the beach- but still no more than a ten minute cab ride (or, when feeling more adventurous, a forty minute walk) away. I spent eight months enjoying such a state of affairs, and finding myself now in the midst of a far more northern winter it is not surprising that I still long for those days now many months past. Having a remote stretch of tropical African coastline at your doorstep is rarely a bad thing, and its absence becomes slightly more conspicuous when battling cold winds on the evening streets of a darkened North American downtown. 

Of course, as it always goes with such experiences, the mind has a tendency to retain the beautiful while muting the more troublesome. Life in Pemba, like anywhere else, had its good and bad sides. The positives are both easy to list off and hard to forget: a stunning tropical setting, a pace of life that redefined relaxed and a people whose warmth and joie de vivre never let on that the country had been in brutal conflict for the better part of the past thirty years. On the negative side, the slow pace and isolation could be stifling from both a personal and professional perspective, leaving one to feel cut off from the ebbs and flows of the wider world.

And then there was the ever-present threat of malaria. In my case, at least, the suspense didn’t last very long- I got it two weeks after arriving there. While that might seem morbidly humorous in retrospect, I don’t recall being particularly amused at the time. Actually, I mostly just remember sitting in the back of a pickup truck, sipping on a warm bottled soft drink as vintage Snoop Dogg drifted out of the speakers and I waited to find out if my fevered delirium was indeed mosquito-related.

Good or bad, the memorable aspects of Pemba were most often to be found in the raw state of both landscape and the human condition in such a place. If modern China is what you get when a money-drunk developmental state tries to order and polish every square inch of land (with decidedly mixed results), then northern Mozambique is far on the other side of that scale: a place where government, regulation and industrial commerce barely register on the radar. In this environment, where people’s capacity to manufacture landscapes is to be found somewhere between extremely limited and non-existent, events which would seem shocking in other more heavily ordered places emerged as normal occurrences, woven into the fabric of the raw tropical landscape.

One such event took place on a weekday sometime in the fall of 2006, when I found myself not at work but at the beach, thanks to a holiday afforded by one of Mozambique’s numerous revolutionary, independence and peace treaty commemorations. Going to the beach on such a day was sheer relaxation, as it was guaranteed to be largely devoid of anyone (Pemba’s main beach-going day was Sunday, when the whole city would descend on the same strip of sand in a cacophony of football games, laughter and cart-wheeling children). The main strip of sand, Wimbe, was touristy in the same way that Pemba can be considered a city- very tenuously. It consisted of a single stretch of small holiday bungalows , a few restaurants and a beach disco- all slightly overgrown around the edges and sporting the strange look of Portuguese colonial architecture (and considering how long the Portuguese stayed, think 1970s concrete modernism, not 19th century).

On that particular afternoon, I found myself immersed in the regular seaside routine of reading, loafing and tropical daydreaming. As per usual, some of the familiar faces were to be seen: co-workers, local and expat foreign aid/development staff, old Portuguese-Mozambican businessmen, government officials, South African bush pilots and perhaps a Cuban doctor or two. This ensemble could also include young Christian evangelicals from southern American states, doling out free ice cream to recruit fresh young souls (I suspect the latter were looking for sweets rather than God). Throw in the occasional cross-Africa backpackers, and you had quite the motley crew of individuals. 

The day was shaping up to be relaxing in an ultimately forgettable sort of way; with the heat of the sun and the hum of the surf, mental activity was at a bare minimum. Collapsed on a chair under a parasol, sometime in between sipping on a Sprite and pretending to read, I managed to look up.

And to my surprise, I saw a crowd of people gathered on the beach. That wasn’t so normal.

The crowd was animated and had its attention turned towards the ocean. At first I struggled to see the source of the commotion, and then I noticed two men swimming towards the shore quite powerfully, dragging something behind them just under the surface. Small boats often loaded and unloaded in the waters just off the beach, with the crew wading back and forth through the water with goods, so I wasn’t quite sure why this particular instance was causing such a scene.

And then the two swimmers emerged from the waves with a corpse in tow.

The crowd moved quickly to surround the bloated body, looking on as if this was merely an abnormally large fish lying on the sand before them. The patrons of the restaurant bar alongside me started to stir, murmur and get up for a better look, roused out of their tropical beach daze. “Must have been a fisherman who fell off his boat in the bay”, someone said, “it looks like he’s been out there a while”.

As the large majority of us stood around rather dumbstruck, someone took the expected course of action and alerted the police. In Pemba, however, it was questionable what exactly that would accomplish: police officers spent the huge majority of their time manning profitable traffic checkpoints, strolling along the beach or standing guard in front of their station with rusty-looking AK-47s. Their baggy, ill-fitting uniforms gave off an air of earnest ineptitude- I highly doubt they received the funding or training necessary to make them more than a casual presence on the town streets (well, when they weren’t confiscating scooters or shooting up suspects, that is).

A few police officers eventually showed up on the scene, but they mostly managed to just stand around looking as befuddled as the rest of us. Unsure of what to do with the dead body, they eventually moved on to the more routine police task: dispersing the crowd with an air of authority. In the midst of it, someone got a hold of a a canvas sheet and covered up the corpse. There was more discussion and standing around on the part of the authorities, but eventually they moved on and left. They didn’t take the body with them. 

With the departure of the police and the dissipation of the crowd, things drifted back into the normal state of affairs. People chatted, sipped on a beer or went for a dip in the warmth of the Indian Ocean. The beach hawkers moved on, bringing their large display boxes of chocolates and sweets with them. A few children ran around laughing and playing in the sand, already oblivious to the covered corpse a few feet away. The sun beat down as usual, and the midday stillness of the tropics was settling back in. I returned to reading, or maybe writing- or most probably daydreaming in a half-awake state. The harsh heat of Pemba had a way of minimizing shock and muting reaction.

But whenever I looked up from my reverie, the picture-perfect tropical scenery upon which so many holiday myths are built included this ghost on the sand, this quiet human casualty of the seas. While it would be tempting to twist this event into an allegory about how all was not well in paradise, I cannot do so- all was in fact quite normal in paradise, the good with the bad in life and death.

The body was still on the beach when I left much later that afternoon.